


For Infamy

by Artemis1000



Series: In Infamy [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Grimdark, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, SniperPilot Spring, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-28 06:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14443143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis1000/pseuds/Artemis1000
Summary: In a world of heroes and villains, where there is little difference left between the two, Cassian Andor and Bodhi Rook both refuse to follow expectations any longer. In the eyes of the world, this makes them just two more villains. Recoil and Haze are fine with that. As these things tend to do, everything changes on the day their paths cross.





	For Infamy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day 3 of [Sniperpilot Spring](https://sniperpilot-prompts.tumblr.com) to the Trumpet Flower prompt - _social standing and fame_ \- while the flower's toxic properties inspired Bodhi's superpowers, it is innocent of the actual supervillain nonsense. Blame the Venom trailer for that, and friends who are too kind to tell me to shut up.

Every night when Cassian was surrounded by nothing but silence and darkness, he returned to the roof.

The sad remains of his strike team huddled tightly together, too many of them bleeding, all of them tired, but relieved to be alive and so close to making it home that they could already taste the heavy cloud of antiseptics that clung to your nose and your taste buds as soon as you stepped into the base’s infirmary.

The mission had gone to hell right from the start. Bad intel, insufficient gear, insufficient manpower, wrong time and wrong place to attack, everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong and as the result, there was now a giant pile of rubble three blocks deep in the heart of a metropolis. Somebody would have to take the blame, he had known that already while they waited for their helicopter to arrive and take them back to base. He had known it would be the last time he wore the uniform of the Advanced Strike Group, or any uniform at all.

Somebody had to take the blame and it would be the sniper who hadn’t been able to make the killing shot before civilians died. All he could hope for was that he’d be able to take the ones responsible with him before their mistakes got more people killed.

There weren’t any cheers when two black helicopters swooped down, lights out and rotors eerily noiseless like floating dark shadows, they were greeted only with groans of relief.

Cassian Andor had been prepared that the next time he rode a helicopter, he would be taken to one of the A.S.G.’s secret prisons, to be locked away among captured supervillains where he would never be able to speak of what had truly happened on this night. He had been prepared to pay the price.

He hadn’t been prepared for the angry swarm of red dots suddenly alighting on his huddle of broken agents.

The shots had been silent.

The screams hadn’t.

When it was over, there had been nothing but silence.

Ever since then, silence and darkness took Cassian Andor back to the roof.

 

Bodhi Rook’s life had always been ruled by heroes and villains and the intricate balance between them, or the price ordinary people paid whenever the balance was upset.

Such was the life of one who grew up in a megacity with too many grimy dark backstreets where caped crusaders battled their equally caped nemeses while normal people were reduced to scenery, to statistics, to objects to be saved or sacrificed to raise this tally or lower…

No.

He shook his head, gaze turning wistful as he let it wander over the nighttime cityscape. From his vantage point up here on the rooftop of a skyscraper, the city looked so peaceful. Towers made up of tiny dots of light amidst the darkness signified all these little lives that made the city something greater than concrete and glass.

No. Once, he had believed in heroes.

Then he had learned that heroes were a lie.

Or maybe they weren’t, somewhere else, somewhere better. Not in their city. Here, there were only vanity and masks of different colors.

Bodhi Rook had no use for costumes and masks. There were a whole lot of rules for villains which Bodhi Rook didn’t care to follow. He wouldn’t even call himself one, but neither did he call himself a hero, and that was enough to make him one in the eyes of those who liked their world neatly divided.

There had never once been a day on which Bodhi hadn’t doubted himself. This, he figured, was what made him different from them all – they never doubted, never questioned the righteousness of their paths, while Bodhi questioned everything.

He leaned against the railing. The wind ruffled through his hair, tugging it free from the messy ponytail he had tied it up in at the back of his neck. He made for a perfectly ordinary sight, windblown dark hair and stubble, comfortable clothes suited to all-nighters in the lab and crawling around in the bowels of his latest engineering masterpieces.

Bodhi wasn’t going to let anyone’s expectations rule his life anymore.

 

When their paths crossed, silence was nowhere to be found.

Cassian groaned as the henchmen threw him onto the ground at Haze’s feet. He squeezed his eyes shut, yearning now for silence and darkness for that maybe would make his world stop spinning violently.

It turned out that closing his eyes only left him more aware of the sensation of the ground distorting beneath him, space distorting _around_ him, and the noises of the bar amped up to a level where every clink of glasses was like thunder in his ears, every bubble of laughter like a deafening shriek. Even with his eyes squeezed shut, Cassian kept seeing faceless bright neon shapes lunging for him.

He gritted his teeth against the pounding headache, _he would not scream_.

“I thought people would know by now what happens if they bring trouble to the Cantina,” Haze said, sounding upset and genuinely disappointed.

Cassian heard him and he also heard his voice blurred and twisted into a roar, both of the realities overlapped until he couldn’t tell anymore which was real.

A sigh. “There’s no talking to you like this, is there?”

And then it stopped. Just like that, as if a switch had been flicked. Going by everything he’d heard about Haze’s engineering feats, Cassian wouldn’t be surprised if a switch _had_ been flicked.

He didn’t dare get up from the ground, for fear that Haze would breathe his poison onto him – it would be much stronger coming right from the source rather than the phial of poisonous green smoke one of the henchman had smashed over his head. He did dare raise his head and take a cautious look around.

He’d made it inside alright, this was the Cantina in all its infamous glory – looking like any other slightly seedy bar in the megacity locals only called the Gut, except that nearly every table housed at least one masked villain Cassian would once have assassinated in the name of justice.

He swallowed down the bile that rose up at the realization that in the eyes of the rest of the world, he was now one of them.

He licked his lips and found his mouth dry. Haze stood over him, his face inscrutable. He looked so ordinary in jeans and sweatshirt and sneakers that Cassian felt hysterical laughter bubble up in him to take the place of the bile. He fought that down, too.

“Haze.”

“Recoil.”

Cassian flinched.

The armed henchmen twitched, taking half a step towards him. A single sharp look from Haze stilled them.

“Get up,” he said, frowning in concern at Cassian. “I don’t think making people kneel is a good way to start a conversation.”

Somehow Cassian found it within him not to laugh in his face.

He almost laughed, yet he knew that this was Haze’s strength. He didn’t act much like a villain. He didn’t cackle and posture, he didn’t build doomsday machines whose threat united the city against him.

It was also why Cassian had come to speak to him out of all the villains gathered in the Cantina.

Cassian picked himself up from the ground – gingerly, still not quite trusting it to remain still beneath his feet.

When he stood and looked into Haze’s eyes, he found them to be large, brown and very warm – nothing like the maliciously glowing poison green urban legends spoke of.

“Are you feeling better? You should sit.” He nodded towards the booth he had occupied. “I’m sorry for the cold welcome, but we don’t get many A.S.G. agents here.”

Cassian flinched a second time. His muscles, still sore from their earlier paralysis, ached and twitched involuntarily. “On second thought, I prefer Recoil.”

They sat. Nobody forced Haze to ask twice.

“When I was younger, I just wanted to fly,” Haze said, leaning forward with his elbows propped up on the table as if they were old friends having a chat. Yet there was an underlying twitchiness to him which didn’t quite fit the picture. Maybe he was just as uneasy as Cassian. He could only hope so. “I couldn’t afford flight school, so I thought of joining the A.S.G.. But I had seen too much of their dirty work growing up here and realized I couldn’t take their hypocrisy.”

Cassian scoffed. Even the tiny exertion was enough to bring back his headache. “And now you’re trying to conquer the Gut. Because that’s so much better.”

“Says the world’s best sniper who blew up half a city, slaughtered his own team and walked away to sell his skills to the highest bidder.”

Cassian gritted his teeth. Under the table, his hands balled into fists.

Silence stretched between them but around them, there was still no silence to be found. Every pair of eyes in the Cantina was on them, barely a mouth silent as speculation was passed on in hissed whispers.

Haze leaned a little further towards him. He looked far more earnest and less malicious than Cassian would have expected, knowing him only from his profile in the A.S.G.’s villain database. “Why are you here?”

Cassian sighed. He folded his hands on the table and looked at them, calloused from too many years of wielding guns and sniper rifles, he looked down at his clothes. Clad in black leather, more prone to scowling than laughing, he looked the part of the villain more than Haze did. And yet… He exhaled. Acknowledged the churning in his gut – and moved on from it. “Because I have nowhere else to go… but you knew that already, didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “I make it my business to know everything about heroes who are no heroes.”

And this, Cassian reminded himself, was why he was here: because Haze was the only one he could trust to care more for bringing down false heroes than for his own victories.

For the first time since that night on the roof, Cassian permitted himself to relax – just a fraction of an inch, but there it was, real and undeniable and tied to a pair of huge brown eyes that looked at him with such kindness and understanding that it _could_ only be a particularly clever deception. Nobody who lived a life like Haze’s could possibly remain capable of such empathy.

For most of his life, Cassian Andor’s life had been clear-cut and neatly divided into black and white, good and evil, heroes and villains. He had worked for the military, for the government, that meant he stood on the side of right, didn’t it? He had worked for people who would know what they were doing, they wouldn’t have been put in charge if they didn’t, would they?

It was more than a little soul-crushing to realize how little he knew.

Cassian’s shoulders slumped. “Our work was good. We caught and imprisoned real killers.”

Haze just hummed, he didn’t argue. Cassian liked to think it was because he didn’t fully disagree, at the very least.

He looked thoughtful, and after a moment he gave a little nod which looked more like he was trying to convince himself than Cassian. “I’m going to help you establish yourself in the Gut and protect you from the A.S.G. You won’t have to sell your skills to crime lords any longer to survive.”

Cassian’s eyes narrowed.

Haze reached for him before Cassian could demand to know the catch. Their fingers barely brushed but Cassian could feel that they were soft and warm. “I have waited a long time for someone I can trust.”

Cassian’s eyes narrowed further. “For someone who will kill for you, you mean.”

He could see Haze cool right there in front of his eyes. “I have enough people who will kill for me.”

Cassian pulled his hand away first but he could still feel Haze’s phantom touch linger. He curled it into a fist. “I can help you bring order to the Gut but I won’t be another henchman.”

“Peace. Not order. Bringing order has just been an excuse for too many deaths.”

He couldn’t see the difference, yet now it was Cassian’s turn to keep quiet and at the very least not disagree.

“We could try,” he said, still unable to think of anything but all the ways in which this partnership was bound to go wrong. Yet he was getting what he had come here, and Haze remained his best shot.

Haze looked uncharacteristic nervous again, a little bit shy even, as he offered his hand properly to Cassian. “In this case, you should call me Bodhi.”

There was something oddly sweet and charming about him, and Cassian would have been lying if he said his stomach didn’t feel queasy in a way which was completely unrelated from his earlier poisoning and far more pleasant – far more dangerous, too, but he chose not to think of that as he accepted Bodhi’s hand and shook it firmly. It was just as warm as he had known it would be.

“Partners… Bodhi.” He pressed his lips together to hide a hint of a smile.

Bodhi didn’t try to hide own smile. “Partners, Cassian.” And then his smile amped up a little brighter and there it was, his eyes glinting haze-green for a moment. “This city won’t know what hit it.”


End file.
